Minnesota State Fairgrounds

When Vice President Teddy Roosevelt delivered his famous ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ speech at the Minnesota State Fair on September 2, 1901, he stood on land that had been a poor farm just sixteen years earlier. The fairgrounds, donated by Ramsey County in 1885 after decades of the fair wandering between Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester, and Winona, transformed 210 acres where the indigent once labored into what would become one of America’s largest state fairs. Days after Roosevelt’s speech, President McKinley was assassinated, making Roosevelt’s words, delivered among livestock displays and competition quilts, his defining presidential motto.

Nobody in the grandstand that afternoon seemed to notice they were witnessing anything historic. The Pioneer Press covered the speech the next day and left out the line entirely, more taken with the laughter and applause than the six words that would eventually get engraved on foreign policy textbooks. Twelve days later, Roosevelt was president, and the phrase followed him there, retroactively promoted from a throwaway aside at a livestock show to the defining creed of a presidency. The fairgrounds themselves underwent no such transformation. They kept right on hosting cattle judging and pie contests, apparently unbothered by the fact that they’d briefly played host to the sentence that would define American diplomacy for the next century.